Monthly Archives: August 2012

Yesterday saw the release of a Dev Diary by Dina “Ayvan” Monas, all about crafting, and it looks like crafting is getting a lot of love this expansion. There is going to be a new tier, Eastemnet, and also a new Guild tier, Grand Master, and a few other little tweaks. Resource gathering will be following the same process as it did with RoI, in that there will be normal resource nodes and rich resource nodes (eg. Skarn and Rich Skarn), which can then be processed into low, medium and high quality ingredients (eg. Low Quality, Medium Quality and High Quality Calenard Ingots). Rare items can again be processed into either optional crit ingredients (eg. Pure Calenard), or used as a more efficient way of processing the High Quality resources. This will probably still be gated behind reputation. As with RoI, special crafting ingredients for single use or Guild recipes, the Cracked Rhi Helvarch Sigil, or whatever it will be in Rohan, is a rare drop from all craft nodes. The good news is that all lower tiers will be following the same pattern, with sapphire, ruby, adamant and beryl shards, and mithril flakes potentially dropping from their relevant tier nodes also.

The way that the non gathering crafting professions (jeweller, tailor, metalworker, weaponsmith, and woodworkers) process the raw materials is being tweaked, so that you can level them without a lot of wastage. Jeweller is not too bad, you can very tediously polish gems until the cows come home without actually using up any resources, but for the others you have to put in an awful lot of raw materials, and often pricey vendor bought ingredients, to come out with a little XP and a pile of vendor trash which rarely makes you a profit.

They have facilitated this with new processing recipes, whereas low quality ingredients can be turned into a “shaving”, and then turned back into low quality items. Once the tier is mastered and you can crit, you could well end up with more resources than you started out with. This sounds like a very positive step.

The new recipes themselves will be more of the same, a few token auto granted and vendor bought, but world drops and reputation gated for the most part. The Dev Diary did say that there would be full armour sets to craft at both 80 and 85, which is good, as a lot of people were frustrated at the piecemeal crafting items in the RoI expansion. As reputation will be, like RoI, earned rather than bartered, this excludes all of us who have un-levelled crafting alts from being able to craft the whole spectrum. Looking at the forums, the community suggestion is that the rep recipes become bound to account to help this along, but whether this will appear in-game at some point or another is a different matter. Expect therefore that the world drop recipes will be at a premium on the Auction, at least for the first few months.

They have also announced another tier of Relics, including crafted relics, for both personal use and mounted combat, which is interesting and a potential source of income for dedicated crafters, and the next level ingredient, the Compendium of Middle Earth Vol IV. To facilitate this they are bringing back the Crafting resource instances like those in Moria, and similar to the Legendary item instances in Galtrev. These will be able to be run daily, and probably also be a nice little addition to reputation.

So, what can crafters do to prepare for this?

For the Eastemnet tier, not really a lot, save make a little space in the vault to store all the new resources. However we can prepare for the new Guild Tier, by making Guild Rep items of lower tiers and stock piling them, ready to hand in. I cannot say how much XP is needed to progress from Master of the Guild to Grand Master (despite being in the BETA we didn’t investigate crafting that much), but I do remember that the last Guild tier was 45k. It is probably going to be in excess of 60k, so this is much better to level with lower tiers, and guild emblems that you don’t want, rather than waste the new tier ones which you want to use for nice new jewelry and armour, so get making and stock piling now.

In terms of crafted relics for your legendary, if you can craft them now, do so, for both the Westfold and Supreme tiers. The ideal ones to make are the basic relics which cost standard materials, and do not need the Compendium of middle earth (volume 1, 2, or 3), though the compendium recipes themselves are also worth doing if you have some spare. Whilst you might not want the relics themselves, the relics can be refined into shards at the Relic master, which will come in nice and handy for creating and customizing new tier relics, especially if (when!) we all want to bling out our War horses legendary bridles with new mounted combat relics. A standard crafted relic gives you 64 shards and are on a daily cooldown, and the compendium of middle earth volume 3 relics will give you in excess of 700 hundred, so they are worth doing as often as you can and, being shared in the wallet, on as many alts as you have, especially as we will certainly be looking at costs in the thousands for melding relics.

We have until 15th October to get what we want to in place so we can go out and explore Rohan, and hopefully come back with bags bulging with resources and recipes.